Keep your mouths shut

A statue in the Place de la Republique hijacked by the Nuit Debout movement, opposed to reforms to France’s labour legislation

Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images

Le Point’s star columnist Franz-Olivier Giesbert wrote last month: ‘France is currently subject to two threats which, though different, are no less dangerous to its integrity: ISIS and the CGT union (Confédération Générale du Travail)... This is just the start. Let us continue the fight against the CGT’. He should be thanked for expressing the true nature of French journalism under political and financial control.

French readers and analysts of the news, from the 1992 Maastricht Treaty referendum to the vote on the EU constitution in 2005, and from the strikes of November-December 1995 to those over the 2016 El Khomri labour law, have been able to see the extent of the discrepancy between the way social conflicts happened and their media portrayal. Entire shelves in university libraries are devoted to dissecting the media’s biases, misconduct, imbalances, double standards and re- and mis-framing of events, almost all detrimental to the protesters.

But the idea of a gap between editorial practices and professional standards is based on an assumption — that journalism, though caught since its inception between the worlds of politics and of money. nonetheless has sufficient autonomy to self-correct, reduce the gap and recover its standards. The media coverage of the conflict over the labour law and the takeover of print media in the run-up to next spring’s French presidential election suggest it possesses nothing of the sort. In businesses subject to ever-tougher economic pressures yet ever more dependent on public aid, editors are not faulted for the lack of a balance they never really tried to establish. As Giesbert acknowledges, the media are not observers; they’re engaged in a fight. And they operate like a political force.

Le Figaro’s editorials are like tracts calling for ‘the left to be seen off and the power of the unions broken’ and are part of the historical continuity of a markedly rightwing paper. It has recently written of (...)

(4) Article 49, paragraph 3 of the French constitution allows the prime minister to force through the adoption of draft legislation. Valls is planning to use this when the law next comes before the National Assembly, scheduled for 5 July.